Dangers of pokertracker stats

[Paluka]

I have a ton of friends in Atlanta, and a few weeks ago I was down there visiting. A lot of them are former Magic players and gamers in general, so of course over the past couple years they have all picked up poker. Me and my fancy NYC friends have been playing quite a bit longer than these guys, so some of the beginners in Atlanta wanted to pick our brains about poker strategy. At least that is what I thought they wanted at first. But after talking to them for awhile, it seemed they weren't interested in poker strategy. They were interested in pokertracker strategy!
Everything these guys talked about was in terms of pokertracker. They didn't want to know how to play poker, they wanted to know what their stats should look like. They would find all sorts of "leaks" in their game like "my aggro factor on the turn is too low" or "i'm losing too many showdowns". But if I said "give me an example of a hand you played badly", they couldn't do it. They never discussed hands, they just played poker and then looked at the stats later and compared. When they would come to a conclusion like "I need to wait until the turn to raise" more, I don't think they had any ability to determine which hands they should make that change on. I'm not sure if they really understood why it mattered.
Now that Nate the Great is posting equations to predict you bb/100, the obsession with stats continues. If someone posts tomorrow on 2+2 that the perfect, optimal, holy grail of PFR is 10.2%, how many pokertracker users are going to know which 10.2% we are talking about?

[swedeD]

I think that online poker has attracted a lot of strategy lovers, like me. Pokertracker's numbers makes the "strategy part" of the brain go nuts. "If I alter my strategy by raising this numbers and decreasing this numbers I will get closer to a perfect strategy, OOOH YEAH, I'm closing in to the perfect strategy. Just have to fix those numbers and then I just can sit down and relax watching my beautiful strategy in progress. It's all about strategy. Put in some hard work finding out the right strategy, the right numbers, and then my brain can take a vacation but the dollars will still keep on rolling.".

Fortunalety poker is a game that needs both tactic and strategy skills (otherwise everyone could make a good bot and the game itself will be more boring). That's why I have started to just use pokertracker after or before a session, never when I play. Those numbers just makes me think about strategy and affects my real-time reads and tactic abilities, making me think about how I should play in general against players with certain PT numbers, instead of using poker skills to determine how I should play in that particular situation to win the most money (info: I play NL). (This is not completely true. There is another reason too, my computer starts to lag if I multitable and use PT and GT+ [img]/images/graemlins/tongue.gif[/img])

This obsession about PT numbers and this, sometimes, lack of understanding that poker strategy need to be adjusted, more or less, to every poker situation that you are faced with, it's great for the online poker world. Recrational players can get an edge against nut peddling multi-tablers. The REAL challenge for a multitabler is to train the brain to adjust the main strategy to loose, tight, aggressiv etc tables and save info in some part of the brain about every table to be used later. The more you train and focus on the the actual hands that are being played, there more you can do this. And, of course, playing online becomes more fun.

Another thing: It's interesting to hear that a lot of magic players are playing poker. Of course, it's not chocking news, the games have some similareties. Can you play magic over the internet for money? I haven't played magic for years since some friends enticed me to play some evenings. That would be fun to play for money though, like backgammon where you can be able to double up the pot.

[MaxPower]

Hey, my biggest leak is that I'm not winning enough BB/100 [img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img]

This must explain why people with decent looking stats make such dumb plays.

While I agree with your sentiment, I do think some of these stats can be useful as metrics. But you do need to be carefull how you interpret and use them.

I generally say make the right decisions and the stats will take care of themselves.

[Bodhi]

Yes, you have a good point. The one way PT did help me when I was beginning was for me to simply get my VPIP down. Posting hands is the most important thing of all.

[MaxPower]

One other thing.

Back when I first started playing online, Paradise Poker was the dominant site. I had done well in low limit casino games, but was getting killed on Paradise.

There was (and is) an excellent program called Pokerstat (Pokertracker didn't exist) that I used to review my play. It really helped me to identify some leaks. Primarily, I was playing too many hands out of position. Once I cleaned up my pre-flop strategy I was able to turn around my play.

So these stats can be helpful if you know how to use them and you focus on the important ones.

Once you become a pretty good player, I think it is less useful.

[Joe Tall]

If someone posts tomorrow on 2+2 that the perfect, optimal, holy grail of PFR is 10.2%, how many pokertracker users are going to know which 10.2% we are talking about?

Question:

How is that positionally broken out versus how many limpers, what are players like behind you and how tight are the blinds?
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Great post, Paluka.

[Nick B.]

Paluka, you need to checkraise more to get your aggression factor up.

[sabre170]

Excellent observation!

For the last 100 years, world-class physicists have mistaken probabilistic descriptions of physical phenomena for the phenomena themselves. When you point this out, they try to intimidate you with their credentials.

Poker players who make the corresponding mistake about their domain of discourse will experience the consequences.

Sabre170

[Justin A]

Great post.

[colgin]

Great post, Paluka. I agree with everything you said (plus it makes me feel better that I focus on how to play better poker rather than spending hardly any time examining my stats per se).